Anne Tyler

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother, yet the prospect is dimming. So, when Willa receives a phone call from a stranger, telling her that her son's ex-girlfriend has...

"Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore's Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children alone: Jenny, high-spirited and determined, nurturing to strangers but distant to those she loves; the oldest son, Cody, a wild and incorrigible youth possessed by the lure of power and money; and sweet and clumsy Ezra, Pearl's favorite,...

"From the beloved and best-selling Anne Tyler, a sparkling new novel about misperception, second chances, and the sometimes elusive power of human connection. Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses...

On the surface Rebecca is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation, something she slipped into when Joe Davitch spotted her at a party in his family's Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. Soon this man, divorced and with three little girls, swept her into his orbit and, before she knew it, she was embracing his family plus a child of their own and hosting endless parties in the...

A lovable loser tries to get his life in order. He is Barnaby Gaitlin, 30, the black sheep of a rich Baltimore family, ex-juvenile delinquent who specialized in housebreaking for kicks. He works for Rent-a-Back, moving furniture for old people, and dreams of having a future.

In what is perhaps her richest and most deeply searching novel, Anne Tyler gives us a story about what it is to be an American, and about Maryam Yazdan, who after
Thirty-five years in this country must finally come to terms with her “outsiderness.”
Two families, who would otherwise never have come together, meet by chance at the Baltimore airport—the Donaldsons, a very American couple, and the Yazdans, Maryam’s fully...

Anne Tyler's retelling of the Shakespeare play "The taming of the shrew."

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: beginning in the year of her death in 1979, Pearl Tull's life moves backward in time to her childhood, to her marriage to Beck and birth of her children, and to Beck's desertion in 1944. Morgan's passing: Morgan Gower, a fake doctor, delivers Emily Meredith of a baby while she and her husband Leon are on tour and then attaches himself to the young couple with unpleasant consequences for everyone. Tin can tree:...

Housewife Charlotte Emory lives a quiet, comfortable existence in Clarion, Maryland. She has always championed living life as simply as possible, casting off material things and celebrating the bare essentials. On an unremarkable rainy day, she decides to simplify her life in a very major way and leave her husband. But before she goes through with her plan, she runs to the bank, a harmless errand that throws her simple life and decision into disarray....

Delia Grinstead, the wife of a Baltimore physician, leaves her life as wife and mother and recreates her own world in a quiet little tree-lined town.